Chapter Fifteen Fenlia
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Fenlia
Fen watches Cat as she works. The first time she healed a Reaper she hadn’t known it was possible.
The second, she had known it could be done but still felt pressured into doing it.
She had struggled – both with the healing and with her frustration at being asked in the first place.
That same frustration exists now, but the actual act of doing the task: that comes easily.
Meanwhile, Cat sits amongst his Reapers, hissing a strange call and response, oblivious to her tension.
He is a different person with them. More confident, more at ease.
And though Fen has grown used to hearing Alest used in public settings, hearing his true name now, slipping out in between the hissing, feels altogether too personal.
For so long, he has always been Cat, a quiet, skulking creature that Elician plucked from the riverbank by the scruff of his neck and delivered to Kreuzfurt as a gift.
Cat admitted to liking the moniker, enjoying the anonymity it provided.
And yet, when the Reapers talk, when they use his birth name, the corners of Cat’s lips twitch upwards in the subtle smile he gives only when he is truly pleased.
Fen finishes her job. She heals the last of the Reapers and wipes the black soot from her palm as best she can.
There is a pile of it now on the floor. She tries to ignore it.
I wish I hadn’t done it, she lies to herself as her chest tightens at the sight of all the people touching their faces in wonder and awe.
The youngest of the Reapers, a teenager with bony legs and sharp elbows, shuffles towards Cat and whispers something.
Cat leans in close, hissing and nodding. He responds with soul, with passion, with a desperate yearning, and it is met, beat for beat, by his fellows. Fen turns away. It’s not her place.
During her training in Crowen, Elena always said she needed to focus on the present, on what is right in front of her and not the past or future.
But what is in front of her is something she’s not ready to face, something she was not expecting.
Cat is her brother’s husband. Fine. She can accept that, just as she can accept how she will no longer be his or her brother’s first priority.
But she thought that meant Cat would stay in Himmelsheim.
And while he is also supposed to be King of Alelune, it had not occurred to her until this moment that he might have no intention of staying in Soleb at all.
For where else would an Alelunen king be, save in Alelune?
‘We should go,’ Fen tells Cat. She tries to keep her voice steady, but she must not succeed. The Reaper Cat is speaking to flinches. He looks at Fen with suspicion, as though she did not just heal his face and give him a new lease of life. As though she is something to be feared.
Cat nods at Fen regardless. He stands, hissing something that is repeated in turn by a few of the Reapers nearest. They collect the teen and Cat stands, saying his goodbyes. The rolling vowels grate on Fen’s ears.
When they leave, Marina is there with the chain. Her eyes look wet. She latches and locks the door, then bows deep enough to be embarrassing. ‘My king,’ she says in Lunae.
‘There is no need,’ Cat mumbles, flushing and awkward.
‘There is every need.’
Cat bows his head, then makes his way down the hall. Fen follows. ‘They still killed everyone in Altas,’ she says.
‘Them and the soldiers, yes.’
‘They’re still…criminals.’
‘For the actions they have done, yes.’
‘So why do anything for them?’
‘Because even criminals deserve the dignity to be perceived the way they choose to be perceived.’
The hall is long. Quiet. Class schedules and painted portraits of famed academics of years gone by line the walls. Children should be here, laughing and learning and smiling. Not war criminals. Not Reapers. ‘If this works, if you do become king – are you going to live in Alerae?’
‘No.’
‘That’s where the ruler of Alelune lives.’
‘I won’t live there.’
‘The Blue Palace then?’
‘It is too far from Soleb.’
‘What would that matter to you? You will have your own kingdom to rule.’ Cat stops short. She stumbles, catching herself in her effort to stay in line with him.
‘I didn’t marry your brother to abandon him, and I married him for far more than just a throne. Right now, thinking of all that comes after…we have not had time. Changes, here, there, yes! The Exalted freed, Altas and trade open along the river—’
‘You’re taking Altas back?’ Fen chokes. There’s no one in the hall to overhear them; they’re far enough away from the guards. But even so, she drops her voice, low and furtive. ‘Cat, after what they did! You can’t just take the city.‘
‘I’m not taking anything. Nothing is decided.
Nothing can be decided until I get the throne.
As for the rest…Elician and I will find a compromise, as a couple and as monarchs.
’ Compromise is a loaded word, one with history that both countries take issue with.
The Marias Compromise delivered Altas to Soleb many years ago and ushered in over a decade of peace…
and a decade of fierce resentment. Fen bites her lip. Shakes her head.
‘It’s too much…it’s too much change.’
‘Solebens,’ Cat sighs, wistful and sad. ‘You are all so desperate to cling to who you are today that you don’t dare dream of tomorrow. Life is the god of the sun, but even he sets and lets the moon rise, and when he takes his turn in the sky once more, lo, something has changed.’
‘A new day is not the same as what you’re proposing.’
‘It is, Fen. A new day is exactly what I’m proposing.
I don’t know what tomorrow looks like, but I know it will not be the same as today.
’ He holds his hand out to her. ‘Come, your brother will wake soon.’ His hand is gloved again.
Hidden away behind a familiar wrap of fabric that she knows far better than the sight of his skin.
Once she shied from the thought of that touch.
But she has changed. She takes his hand, and he squeezes his fingers around her palm.
They walk through the many halls of the school until they are almost at the entrance.
The guards stationed there are talking to each other in harsh voices, shouting and passing questions back and forth.
Their heads swivel when they see Cat, and Cat has one bewildered moment of incomprehension before he rallies and asks them, ‘What’s going on? ’
‘We just brought food to the Alelunen soldiers,’ the lead of the group explains slowly.
‘And?’ Cat presses.
‘They’re dying,’ the guard gets out. Fenlia’s blood freezes in her veins. ‘They’re all dying, and we don’t know why.’
Cat releases her hand. ‘Go get your brother,’ he commands, and she runs, as fast as she can, all the way back to the inn.
The guard did not exaggerate. The army Gillage sent to Soleb is dying.
They cough up great mouthfuls of phlegm.
Their faces are dripping with feverish sweat.
But perhaps most alarming of all is their skin.
Black splotches spread like death itself across their flesh, eerily reminiscent of the burns she erased from all the Reapers’ faces just that morning.
‘None of you noticed this before?’ Fen asks the guards as Cat and Elician crouch at the feet of a prisoner closest to the door. The man is shivering violently, hugging himself tight, doing his best to obscure the dark marks from their sight.
‘They seemed fine yesterday,’ the guard replies hastily.
Lio, having joined Elician at the school, gives him a sharp look. ‘Yesterday you reported they were experiencing signs of a cold.’
‘But it wasn’t like this! I would have reported something like this!’
‘So, all of this happened overnight?’ Cat cuts in.
The guard shrugs helplessly, and Elician turns back to the soldier he was examining earlier. ‘What were the symptoms of the cold?’
The man spits at him. The glob does not get far. It dribbles down his chin and he hacks, doubling over and coughing as thick red-brown phlegm drains from his throat and onto the ground. ‘Do you want to die?’ Fen asks, but Cat raises a sharp hand in her direction.
‘Stop,’ he commands.
‘It’s fine,’ Elician adds.
‘That man murdered our queen!’ a prisoner yells, pointing at Elician, his passion sending him careening straight into another coughing fit.
‘My uncle murdered your queen,’ Elician replies, calm as a pool. ‘But I brought you back from the dead during the melee, and I’d prefer it if you didn’t die here when I’d far rather send you home to your families. So tell me, when did your symptoms start?’
‘The day after the fight,’ someone says. This person’s blotches are climbing up over their face. Their nose is swollen, their eyes set deep into their skull, their lips tinged blue. Each breath they draw is strained, wheezing in and out as if they’re being strangled.
‘These soldiers feel like death. But it’s…wrong,’ Cat says. ‘I can feel them dying, and yet…it’s not Death that’s killing them.’
Fen avoids the irritant who spat at her brother and goes to the next-closest prisoner. This one, a middle-aged woman with hair pulled back in a knot and an exhausted expression, does nothing as Fen kneels at her side. Raising her hand, Fen touches the woman’s black-splotched skin.
Billions of cells are rushing this way and that. Organs are pulsing, squeezing and constricting. Enzymes are speeding from one direction to another. All of it at an accelerated pace that is far more extreme than anything Fen has ever felt before. She feels what Cat already said: it is death.
But it is also life.